3 The difference is certainly visible. In fact, the forum is not a lot of people, whose opinion is worth listening to. I think, those who are here for more than a year, have their own list of top 10-100 useful posts, topics, etc.
In my data, I observe that older users don't participate in all announcement threads, they tend to be very selective in their contribution. Can you tell how they select and identify the thread to participate in?